Kentucky State Fair showman says border collies are the ideal students

Alan Miller leads a show called Miller’s Border Collies at the 120th Kentucky State Fair. The West Wing exhibit will run through Aug. 24, one day before the fair ends.

Miller, a farmer and former school teacher who lives in Nelson County, gives his border collies commands to herd a group of ducks around a small pen. The popular exhibit was started by his late father, Harold.

LPM News’ Jacob Munoz went to Miller's farm to speak with him about the show, now in its 54th year. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When you started, what was it like? Was this something that you started from the ground up?

I am the second generation. Harold Miller, a vocational agriculture teacher from Hardin County, moved to Bloomfield, Kentucky, and got a kind of prestigious vocational agriculture job in Bloomfield.

On some kind of road trip, he saw a little black and white dog taking a herd of milk cows up a mountain. So he found his way up that mountain, up a little gravel road to where that man was milking those cows. Asked that man, after the conversation had ensued for a little bit, “Does that dog do that all the time?” “Twice a day, 365 days a year.” And my dad said, “Did you teach him to do that?” “Nope, learned it by himself.” “What kind of dog is that?” “That's a border collie.”

From your experience, is that what it is, that border collies just know instinctively? Or do you have to kind of nudge them in the right direction at all?

It’s a mixture of genetic predisposition and training. A border collie has natural instinct. If you get the right lines, they're cooperative, which means they want to learn. It's like the person with the Afghan [hound] that walked up to me and said, “Oh, my dog could do what a border collie could do if he wanted to.” So guess what? I'm a school teacher. I always liked the students who tried better than the ones [who] could and wouldn't. Everybody likes a dog that's cooperative.

This year, the four dogs I'm working [with] might have 19 years of experience. And it’s, it's a unique place. It's a very small pen, if you've seen it. We use ducks instead of sheep, and the crowds are large enough to where you cannot see out of the pen. So that's kind of a lot of pressure.

Tell me a little bit more about that show, because the dogs are guiding the ducks in and across the pen, but you're also having to give them commands and instructions. What is that like for you? And are there times when the dogs just don’t cooperate, and how do you handle that?

There's a lot of variables there. You take one human being, you take four dogs, you take five ducks, [and] you take a crowd of 450 people hooting and hollering and whistling.

Sometimes the ducks don't want to do what the dogs want them to do. The dogs are not perfect, you know, they make mistakes. I make plenty of mistakes, and I'm just sort of the coordinator. But when we accomplish our little bitty goals in the little demonstration, it seems to be pleasing to people.

Is there anything else that you think is important to know about your show?

When my dad started, he really believed that not a lot of people came back through the livestock. And he always sort of believed that we drew a lot of people back to that West Wing. And he probably was right. So I've always felt like we're helping, helping pull people back here.

Breya Jones contributed to this story.